Tuesday, 23 September 2014

The Real Nature of New Atheism

I read a fantastic article in The Atlantic a few days back, which detailed how a moderate christian group is doing a study on college atheists,
to try to understand what leads people away from religion and into
atheism. They’re doing it with a religious goal in mind of course
(though they claim that their goal is to “bridge the gap as gently and
respectfully as possible”), but that doesn’t exactly invalidate the
nature of what they’ve found.

And what they found was fascinating. You see there that almost all
the young atheists interviewed would CLAIM that they came to atheism
through a process of “logical deduction”, reason, science, etc. Ie.
that it was a pure and objective intellectual analysis that has led them
to conclude that they can not only state a lack of belief but make a
positive statement of disbelief about the existence of any kind of
supreme being.

In practice, though, the foundation discovered a common median pattern among American college-age “New atheists”:
1. they had gone to church as children.
2. They felt somehow unsatisfied with their church experience. In
many cases, they had experienced some kind of very positive early
impression only to later encounter some kind of frustration with their
particular church.
3. They felt the “answers” their churches offered weren’t sufficiently profound.
4. Many of them expressed profound respect for ministers who took
their religion seriously (and were, conversely, disillusioned by people
in positions of authority in their church who seemed shallow).
5. Almost all of them left their religion between the ages of 14-17.
6. Almost all of them had some kind of key emotional incident that
occurred at the time they left their religious institution behind.
7. They cited the Internet as a main source for discovery about Atheism.

So, in short, this article presents what I’ve been saying about New
Atheism for quite some time. Namely, that these sorts of aggressive
atheists are not actually people who have “thought things through”,
they’re people who have had an emotional experience that led them to
react negatively, not to god, but to organized religion, and more often
christianity, and very often a specific type of christianity they were
brought up in. They try to hide behind science, but what they’ve had is
clearly a “conversion experience”, and for emotional reasons they have
chosen to embrace an irrational statement of positive disbelief to make
up for what they now think of as previously-irrational belief.

The thing is, these experiences, or at least points 1-6, are
something that would very much fit my own history; and indeed, by the
time I was 16 I was a staunchly avowed atheist. As it turns out, I
outgrew that. I came to realize that my it wasn’t that I was now sure or
could be sure that god didn’t exist because he didn’t personally take
care of making everything nice for me; and that really my problem was
not that “religion is stupid and pointless”, but that the particular
religious environment I was in was stupid, it was one that encouraged
shallow thinking. I didn’t want to reject the spiritual, I wanted the
profound experiences that I felt cheated out of by a milquetoast church
that was full of sleepy not-really-practitioners or mindless-bigots and
answered to a bloated corrupt temporal hierarchy. So after growing up
out of exoteric religion, which is mostly dumb, I grew up out of atheism
too, which is just as dumb; and then I discovered the spiritual virtue
of being able to say “I don’t know”, followed by “but I’m going to try
damn hard to find out, and I won’t take anyone else’s word for it”.
Instead of abandoning god, I abandoned belief, which is the barrier to
Truth (and this of course includes the “god” of my beliefs, along with
everyone else’s). It strikes me that New Atheists have abandoned the
God of their childhood sundays, but have clung steadfastly in the best
of late-adolescent fashion to the God of Their Own Beliefs, re-labeling
him as “science”, when he’s anything but.

But that term is still ascribing belief when the very word atheism means disbelief or lack of belief in god or gods. It's an old argument that atheists are a religion themselves, or that we believe in something supernatural, but we just haven't found out what yet. Why so many people can't get that boggles my mind.

(Not much of a surprise here, as children have no choice whether they go to church or not. They do as their parents wish at that age)

2. They felt somehow unsatisfied with their church experience. In many cases, they had experienced some kind of very positive early impression only to later encounter some kind of frustration with their particular church.

(Young children are gullible and naturally trust authority figures. That is until they learn more about how the world around them works. It should come as no surprise they received the stories of religion positively when they were young, but as they aged their cognitive dissonance grew)

(Similar to #2. As they aged they saw more and more inconsistencies and lack of evidence for the claims the authority figures within their respective religion were making)

4. Many of them expressed profound respect for ministers who took their religion seriously, and were, conversely, disillusioned by people in positions of authority in their church who seemed shallow.

(I don't think that sort of reaction is unique in respect to observing religious authorities. I think all children as they age and become teens go through the same sort of realizations regarding any sort of authority figure that lets them down)

5. Almost all of them left their religion between the ages of 14-17.

(The teen years are tumultuous to say the lest. And also the time of greatest rebellion against parents and other authority figures. So this also makes sense)

6. Almost all of them had some kind of key emotional incident that occurred at the time they left their religious institution behind.

(To Teens, everything when you a teenager is bigger than life. Every emotion is writ large and your the first person ever to experience what your experiencing. Look at how dramatic "first loves" are. So again this seems perfectly normal, and nothing out of the ordinary relating to religion.)

7. They cited the Internet as a main source for discovery about Atheism.

(This also makes sense. The Internet is the #1 information source for the majority of people in the Western World. And more importantly, it's a pace where new and different ideas can be explored without censorship. You can learn about the ideas of Outgroups, where before the advent of the Internet that was possible though much more difficult. And before Books it was near impossible to escape the group think and censorship your Ingroup could exert over you.)